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Bodiesatwork.Pdf Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page i Bodies at Work Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page ii Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page iii Bodies at Work Carol Wolkowitz SAGE Publications London ●●Thousand Oaks New Delhi Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page iv © Carol Wolkowitz 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42 Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 7619 6063 5 978 0 7619 6063 8 ISBN 1 7619 6064 3 978 0 7619 6064 5 Library of Congress control number: 2005934169 Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page v Contents List of Figures and Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Embodiment and Paid Employment 9 2 Picturing Embodied Labour 33 3 Industrial Bodies 54 4 Customer Services 70 5 Vulnerable Bodies: Workplace ‘Accidents’, Injury and Ill Health 100 6 Will Any Body Do? Conceptualising the ‘Prostitute Body’ 118 7 Body Work as Social Relationship and as Labour 146 8 Concluding Remarks 171 References 185 Index 207 Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page vi Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page vii List of Figures and Illustrations 2.1 Hannah Cullwick blacking boots 39 2.2 Carte de visite portrait of a pit-brow worker 42 2.3 The Sky Boy 46 2.4 Machinists at work 50 2.5 K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Cell, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 50 2.6 Control Desk in the Master Control Room, K-25, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 51 3.1 Content of workstation ‘strengthening of rear floor’ in MV (1/1000ths of a minute) at Peugeot, France 63 4.1 Beauticians at Chez Maurice, Miami 75 4.2 Hairdresser in Homestead, Florida 76 7.1 My domestic army 156 Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page viii Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page ix Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge, first of all, the courtesy of individuals and institutions who reproduced, helped me to locate or gave me permission to use a number of different photographs or other materials, including Rebecca Barnard at Solo Syndications, Gerald Beasley and Julia Toser at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, Anne Braybon, Jean-Pierre Durand, Jo Ann King at King Visual Archives, Bill Maguire, Palgrave Macmillan, Holly Reed at the United States National Archives, Jonathan Smith at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, N. Adam Watson at the Florida State Archives, Ed Westcott and Peggy Wilson. I also want to thank a large number of people for the very extensive sup- port I have had in writing this book, in particular the postgraduates who have taken my Body/Work course, as well as some of my doctoral students, for their insights and suggestions of materials, including especially Thea Cacchioni, Terence Chong, Halla Dijab, Nicola Gale, Heather Leask, Ben Lo, Pam Lowe, Emma Nelson, Julia Rayment, Nina Robinson, Lesley Spiers, Marianna Tortell and Pam Wakewich. I have benefited from research assistance from Duncan Adam, Danny Beusch, Jane Ellis and Matt Elton and conversations with Kate Sloss and Chris Massingham. I feel indebted to the support of almost every colleague in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, but especially to helpful discussions with Simon Williams and to the generosity of those colleagues who read and commented on earlier drafts of all or parts of the book – Terry Lovell, Tony Elger, Christina Hughes and Nickie Charles. Karen Phillips and Anna Luker at Sage were endlessly patient. Paul Stewart kindly took the time to read the final manuscript. Members of the extended Wolkowitz family – Rhoda, Dan, Barbara, John, Rick and Barbie – not only have been consistently encouraging but also debated the ideas with me. But most of all I need to thank Martyn Partridge, without whose support this book could never have been written, and our son Tim Partridge, especially for his present of ‘The Body in the Library’. Wolkowitz-3415-Prelims.qxd 6/16/2006 10:11 AM Page x Wolkowitz-3415-Introduction.qxd 6/16/2006 10:16 AM Page 1 Introduction The changed meaning of the ‘body shop’, from a section of a car factory – or a garage knocking wrecks back into shape – to The Body Shop, a chain of stores selling products to relax and enhance the appearance of human bodies, is now so entrenched that some younger people may scarcely remember the earlier usage. The shifting connotations of the phrase ‘body shop’ testify to complex changes in how we think about the role of the human body in economic life and employment relations. Because much of the production of things has been exported to countries where wage rates are lower, or environmental or other controls less strict, workers in the richer Western nations are increasingly con- centrated in jobs in the service sector, in which interpersonal interactions, as compared to the making of objects, is often of greater importance. This shift means that if we want to consider embodiment in the workplace, we need to consider changes as well as continuities in the constructions of the body and its uses that guide, empower, constrain and exhaust many kinds of workers. Based on a wide range of literatures, this book crosses conventional demarcations, demonstrating the contribution that concepts developed in the sociology of the body can make to our understanding of changing patterns of work and employment; equally important, it highlights the impact of work and employment on experiences of embodiment. It shows that the body/work nexus is crucial to the organisation and experience of work relations, and, con- versely, that people’s experience of embodiment is deeply embedded in their experiences of paid employment. To date the body and embodiment have constituted a relatively minor thread in research on organisation, work or employment. Even where they are present, this theme tends to be subsumed within the focus on work cultures and identities. Research and debate have tended to follow the main drift of postmodernist approaches on the body, highlighting the production and consumption of the fluid and dynamic symbolic body as a feature of social Wolkowitz-3415-Introduction.qxd 6/16/2006 10:16 AM Page 2 INTRODUCTION interaction. While this perspective has succeeded in bringing the body into our picture of work, one of the problems of such an approach may be its exaggeration of the malleability of the body and its underestimation of the bodily effort work still involves. This can result in a failure to recognise that, as journalist Madeleine Bunting (2004: 177) puts it, ‘human beings have finite resources, physical and emotional’. Workplaces and work identities focused around competition and long hours, a ‘can do anything’ culture, have ignored this, leading to the current epidemic in stress, overwork and depression. One of the key arguments of this book is the need to supplement the body as con- structed by the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology with a fuller picture of the con- tinuing materiality of workplace activity, including the many ways in which workers’ health and safety contribute to their experience as embodied social actors. This entails making fuller use of feminist perspectives that, though long concerned to reveal the contribution of embodied sexual difference to language and culture (for example Grosz 1994; Moi 1999) need to be widened so as to encompass more aspects of embodiment, especially in the context of employment relations. The origins of this book go back to two experiences that provoked a lot of thought about the body as a focus of diverse labour processes. The first was my observations of my father’s care in an American hospice in the weeks before his death from cancer in the late 1980s. Although I was aware of crit- icisms of the objectification of the body by the biomedical model adopted by doctors, what struck me more forcibly at the time was the relation between the division of labour that governed work in this institution and the frag- mentation of the human patient. Concern for the patients’ emotional well- being was seen as the responsibility of the hospice chaplains, and seemingly completely divorced from either pain relief, which was delivered by nurses at set hours, or the physical upkeep of the patients’ environment. Rooms would be dusted, tables wiped and floors swept as if the bed in the room were empty; and every time the mop handle rattled my father’s bedstead he would wince with pain. Even in a hospice, a type of institution supposedly guided by notions of holistic care (Saunders et al.
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